


Where I Belong

by mimimini



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Galaxy Express 999, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, M/M, i'll add new ones eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 14:05:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18074813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimimini/pseuds/mimimini
Summary: The stars and the planets are flying by the window and Doyoung has been sitting in this train car for too long, because he’s starting to think they all look the same.





	Where I Belong

**Author's Note:**

> my knowledge of galaxy express 999 is kind of vague, and mostly comes from the first dozen or so books of the original manga, read years ago, but its atmosphere and leiji matsumoto's universe in general have always fascinated me, so that's how i ended up writing this. i can't promise constant updates since i've been busy with university stuff, but i'll try my best.

The stars and the planets are flying by the window and Doyoung has been sitting in this train car for too long, because he’s starting to think they all look the same.

The car is empty except for him. The only sentient being Doyoung has seen since he got on the train is the train conductor, showing up every time the train stops.

“Are you getting off here?”

No, he’s not.

He has ventured outside, yes. The stops are long, and a proper bed every once in a while is something he can afford, so he goes to the stations’ hotels from time to time. Sometimes, at the beginning of his travel, he even went out for food, doing some sightseeing, but he grew bored of it after the fifth or sixth time.

It’s just so dull. Nothing looks like his home planet. It’s not like his planet was anything special, he knows rationally, but it was the place where he grew up and thought--naively, now he knows--he would die. The memories of the greens, the whites, the yellows, the reds, the purples. The grass and the flowers were the first that had died, not long after the bees disappeared silently, unnoticed, and by the time the population had started leaving the planet those colors covering the surface of the planet were distant memories. Doyoung, as the last on the planet, has the dead colors of the planet surface covered in dirt and metallic junk burned into his memory, and yet he still can see all the lost colours every time he closes his eyes. How the breeze felt before it started smelling like the plague.

He opens his eyes again, and the train conductor is there, silent as always.

“We’re making a brief stop to pick up a passenger,” the train conductor tells him. “You cannot leave the train. The planet is about to explode.”

A kindred soul.

For the first time in ages, Doyoung feels a hint of excitement in his heart, but it burns rapidly like a flame on a match. Why does he seek the company of someone with eyes as dead as his own?

 

Dreams while he’s on the train are brief, ambiguous things. Sometimes they don’t feel like his own dreams; it’s like he’s going through someone else’s story, seeing things that his mind shouldn’t play with. They aren’t nightmares, and when he wakes up he doesn’t feel scared, but what happens in them is usually terrible, or sad, or both. However, just as travelling further and further has dulled his interest in visiting all those planets that don’t look like what he’s yearning for, Doyoung has grown desensitized to those weird little dreams.

Some other times, they feel like Doyoung’s dreams. He can’t remember any of them once he wakes up, but he’s always drenched in sweat when he opens his eyes, his breathing irregular. He doesn’t remember them, but he _knows_. Those are his own nightmares, and that’s all that still connects him with his old planet, in a certain sense, because they’ve always been there.

Sometimes, they feel like a completely different thing, as if he were taking a peek into someone’s memories. They aren’t like the other dreams, nor like his own nightmares. He sees an unknown world that feels familiar, and Doyoung knows that if he could turn on his feet when he’s in them, he would see the owner of this memories’s face, right in front of him.

 

An explosion somewhere behind the train lights up the space, and Doyoung wonders what the planet’s name was.

 

 

  
“Do you mind if I sit here?”

Doyoung opens his eyes, wide awake and startled. The young man in front of him looks pretty normal: tall, a kind smile on his face. His voice is quiet, but it’s his whole presence that puzzles Doyoung. If the conductor doesn’t feel _there_ until you see him, this guy doesn’t feel completely real even, his presence like a reflection on a mirror.

Those aren’t his own eyes, though.

“Suit yourself,” Doyoung tells him, because what else is he supposed to say?

“I’m Jungwoo,” the man tells him as he sits on the seat facing Doyoung’s. “And you’re Doyoung, right?”

He’s sure they haven’t met before, and yet it’s like Doyoung should have known Jungwoo’s name already. He doesn’t feel surprised when Jungwoo says his name, and it takes a couple of seconds before the gears in his brain kick in and he realises that something is a little off. “How do you know my name?” he asks.

Jungwoo shrugs. “The train conductor told me.”

 

No matter how long he stays there, Jungwoo’s weird presence doesn’t change. He’s so quiet, Doyoung sometimes doubts he even breathes through his nose. If Doyoung closes his eyes for a bit, he can’t feel Jungwoo sitting in front of him anymore. It’s like one of those statues that only move when you’re looking away, but the opposite. It unsettled Doyoung at first, but with time he’s grown accustomed to it. Jungwoo looks humanoid just like him, but Jungwoo’s folks must have evolved differently on his now deceased planet.

Doyoung is sure Jungwoo is the passenger they picked up before the planet exploded.

Jungwoo hasn’t spoken ever since their first exchange, and Doyoung hasn’t either. His gaze keeps wondering to Jungwoo, however, and Jungwoo never fails to notice Doyoung’s eyes on him, looking back every time Doyoung’s eyes linger a tad longer: he gives Doyoung a small smile, and then his eyes go back to the window.

 

The next stop is brief, barely a matter of hours. Doyoung doesn’t leave the car. Jungwoo does, though; one moment he’s there, the next he’s near the end of the car, and when Doyoung bats his eyes once more, he’s nowhere in sight. Doyoung closes his eyes, and soon he’s nodding off.

 

The rain pelts against the glass, its pitter-patter distantly familiar. By the end, there was no rain, only one drought destined to last for eternity. He moves to try and open the window, but the frame won’t budge. One last attempt and he gives up, falling back in his seat. It’s a pity. He misses the smell of the damp earth. It had a specific name in his mother tongue, he vaguely remembers, but he can’t recall it.

The landscape out of the window isn’t much different from his planet’s good days, but it’s not his planet. It will never be.

And this isn’t the train either.

He’s sitting at a wood table, on a chair that looks like the old ones his grandmother had at her house. The room looks cozy, with pictures on the walls, an old sofa with a lace cover and useless trinkets set on the furniture.

He gets up to have a closer look at the pictures.

 

When Doyoung finally wakes up, Jungwoo is back, sitting in front of him. After a couple of seconds, Jungwoo notices his gaze and looks back, smiling. “We left the planet a couple of minutes ago,” Jungwoo tells him as Doyoung sits up, rubbing the spot on his forehead that was pressed against the window.

“I was having a dream,” Doyoung says.

“I see,” Jungwoo hums, still smiling.

“It was your dream.”

“Mine?”

Doyoung doesn’t bother to explain further. “Are you a ghost?”

Jungwoo looks amused. “What makes you think so?”

“I’ve been seeing your dreams for a while.” He almost adds a couple of words about how his presence feels more like a non-presence, but he bites his tongue instead.

“I’m not a ghost.” Jungwoo laughs softly. “It’s the first time someone asks me if I am one.”

“Were you the last one left on your planet before it exploded?”

“Quite the opposite,” Jungwoo replies, still smiling, tilting his head to the side. “I was the only one who left it, you know.”

Doyoung wants to ask a thousand other questions, but he falls silent.

 

Jungwoo’s home in the dream looked warm and filled with love, but there was also a desolated note, a fine layer of dust on most of the things in its rooms. The pictures on the walls of the living room depicted a family of three up until Jungwoo looked like a high school student, but there weren’t any other pictures that went beyond that. The only trace of Jungwoo’s growth beyond his gangly teenager days was his college degree in one corner.

When he had examined the living room to his heart’s content, he had noticed the flight of stairs in one corner and had moved immediately to them, but before he could lay his foot on the first step, he had seen him. Jungwoo was standing at the window of the living room, observing something moving in the small garden on the other side of it.

He had moved behind Jungwoo to take a better look at the garden. A dog was running around in the rain, swaying its tail excitedly, tongue out. The garden looked like it got minimal care, with more weed than actual grass. The dog was playing in a patch full of dandelions with no seeds left on them.

It was the first time Doyoung saw the face of the owner of the memories he’d been seeing in his dreams, and yet he didn’t feel surprise realising that the dreamer whose face he’d been dying to see was Jungwoo’s.

 

“How are you so sure that what you’re seeing are my dreams? I wasn’t even sleeping now.”

Doyoung blinks at him.

“I just know,” he mutters.

Jungwoo laughs.

 

The first time they both get off the train at one of the stops, it happens because Jungwoo is magnetic, and Doyoung has realised that resistance is futile. He follows him in silence, outside the train, and then outside the station. It’s quiet, and the fog envelopes everything, making borders fuzzy and details vague.

“There’s no one around,” Doyoung notes.

“The conductor told me they’re scared of the fog,” Jungwoo explains, a couple of steps ahead.

Doyoung shivers. The humidity is creeping under his clothes, and his old beret feels stuffy and not enough at the same time. “Is it safe walking around like this?”

“The fog won’t harm visitors,” Jungwoo reassures him.

There’s a tall building at the end of the street, Doyoung can see the hazy lights from the windows. The sounds are muffled by the fog, and it almost feels like one of his dreams, as if he and Jungwoo were suspended in a shapeless dimension where everything is wrapped in cotton. Jungwoo walks with confidence, the confidence Doyoung believes is of someone who’s been here before, but when Doyoung asks him if that’s actually the case, Jungwoo laughs and denies it.

Suddenly filled with fear at the idea of losing Jungwoo from his sight, Doyoung hastily catches up with him.

 

 

  
“Where are you travelling to?” Doyoung asks Jungwoo when looking at the stars outside the window becomes too much.

Jungwoo smiles, his sweet smile that always makes Doyoung’s chest feel a bit too tight. “I haven’t decided yet,” he answers in his usual quiet tone. “And you?”

Doyoung just shakes his head.

He doesn’t know where he wants to get off, but none of the planets they have visited so far looked like the kind of place Doyoung would like to spend the rest of his life, that he knows.

He wonders where all the people from his planet went, after leaving the planet, after leaving him behind. Maybe they all moved to a new space colony. Maybe they’ve dispersed, scattered across the galaxy. He was the last, the one who closed the door seconds before the planet imploded. The train barely rattled when hit by the shock wave as it ran away from the planet, just like it happened with Jungwoo’s planet. As expected from a Galaxy Express.

Jungwoo nods after a few seconds, the small movement catching Doyoung’s attention. “Looks like we’ll spend some time together until we figure it out, then.”

 

 

  
“Do you think you’ll get a mechanical body one day?”

The train is stopping for two days at an utterly quiet planet. Jungwoo, for once, decided not to get off, and without Jungwoo going with him, Doyoung lost all his interest in stepping foot outside as well. He’s been looking at the empty train station for a while, looking at the fancy technological appliances for the non-existent travelers scattered around.

“I don’t think so, no,” Doyoung replies, not even taking time to think about it. “Are you planning to?” he asks back after a couple of seconds. Jungwoo doesn’t look like the kind of person who’d switch to a mechanical body, even if he could. There weren’t a lot of people able to afford such a luxury in his home planet, and those were the first ones who left. Jungwoo doesn’t feel like one of them, even though Doyoung knows Jungwoo was the only one leaving his own planet before it exploded.

Jungwoo blinks at him. “I already have one.”

**Author's Note:**

> sorry if the english is weird at times, this isn't my mother tongue and i don't have a beta reader to correct my grammar ^_^;;
> 
> you can talk to me on [cc](https://curiouscat.me/mimimini)!


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